Can we talk about Process Automation?

When I mention Process Automation or Document Workflow to a client, I get much the same response that you can expect to see as people awkwardly try and evade someone trying to sell them Timeshare or discuss Medicins Sans Frontiers.

We all know the drill:

• “I’m off to an urgent appointment” or some such;
• “I’d love to engage, but I would need to speak with my partner first”;
• Or you get stuck politely listening, but feverishly trying to think of a credible reason to escape.

This is amusing, but the analogy runs true. There is always something else the client would rather be talking about, they need buy-in from another department or head, or they just don’t see it as a significant enough of a problem to want to talk about.

There is the yawn-factor too; In an age of App Store instant purchases and Internet Banking, our modern information consumption era of Cloud and Big Data, process automation seems boring and almost archaic. Furthermore, most Business Managers or CIOs typically want to focus their efforts elsewhere.

So what is the customer / consumer perspective?

My guess is that the customer is demanding more.

And why wouldn't they?

Regardless of whether you’re talking about a University enrollment, a Patient Admittance or an Insurance Claim, in many instances you’re dealing with a person who has become used to consuming online services or performing admin related activities with far greater ease of use, and automation of information which is so pervasive and seamless, that it seems almost invisible.

Demanding perhaps isn’t the right word; they’re not going to be picketing outside your business or signing any petitions, but if you’re not delivering services the way they want to consume them, and someone else is, they may be voting with their feet.

The Process

In my experience, the Claims Process, the Patient Admission and University Enrollment are great examples of inefficient manual processes fraught with inefficiency and risk of error, they can be complex and can differ significantly from case to case, so let’s take a look at a typical Enrollment Process for a Private School as a simple example:

Some disclaimers:

• This is an oversimplification, especially of the process funnel, but the key elements are all there.
• The Record System on the Right hand side might be physical or electronic, the basic premise remains the same.

If we add some detail to the steps assumed to be within the Process Funnel, we get the following mock-up:

I unashamedly “guesstimated” the duration of each step, and assumed a logical order. It could be very easily argued that the duration hours are skewed, or individual steps may be ordered differently. You might even argue that a certain step should be green not red, or vice versa, but the take-away message would remain unchanged: The number of steps, and associated amount of time that could arguably be referred to as Non Value-Add (grey), probably outweigh the Value-Add (white) steps.

(If you're on a mobile device, forgive the image quality. I'm working on it, and I don't use shutterstock...)

What is more, is that of the 4 (again over-simplified) swim-lanes, an inordinate amount of time and effort is required by the External Manual leg of the process, i.e. the Applicant.

Looking at the same data in a graph doesn't make it look any better either:

Less than 20% of all time/duration/effort attributable to steps in our example which can arguably be considered to be value adding.

I don’t need to explain why that isn't good.

The Customer’s Experience

In addition to that let us consider the Customer Journey. (Customer Journey Mapping is an awesome may to re-define your existing processes, from end to end and discover what customers really feel about the experience.)

The Customer Thought-points aren't pure speculation; certainly what I would be thinking during the same process. The key observation from this table is that the steps highlighted in blue, are the ones the Applicant is directly aware of. The rest, are invisible.

So what’s my point?

I believe that taking a brutal look at your processes, from a resource / time efficiency perspective, and also from the viewpoint of the customer, may reveal a current state you aren’t happy with, but the cost / time / effort to change seems more than it is worth.

Articulating the current state in terms of the two indexes, i.e. Value-Add vs Non Value-Add and Customer Journey, provides a level of insight that would probably compel most organisations to re-prioritise where Process Automation comes in on the program of change charted for your business.

Most document related processes rely at some point on information which needs to be supplied, verified, transcribed and stored. For now, this information is going to be bound to a document, electronic or otherwise. (ISO 9001 refers to a document as information and its supporting medium; the medium being either paper, readable image or electronic file).

The days of people being paranoid about ATMs or Online Shopping are over. Soon we won’t be paranoid about storing our data on free cloud services either. The technology has become pervasive and since I haven’t read of any disastrous side effects in the media, I’ve started trusting the technology and enjoying the ease of use it brings me. Some people were early adopters, some people are later, but eventually we will all be on-board!

This way of transacting and interacting is so common on Social Media, as well as some of my more progressive Service Providers, I’m almost beginning to expect it everywhere. Even if I didn’t have a great grasp of systems, storage, networks and concepts like encryption and authentication, I would intuitively understand how these systems are talking to each other on some level, and how after I click a button, something happens somewhere in the world and I am provided a service.

If any key process business involves a) a document and b) a customer/consumer it could probably do with re-evaluation. People notice business interactions that are awesome. With the added benefit of efficiency improvement, time saving and reduction in error margin, there really isn't a down-side.